On the 15th of January 2026 myself and Ujjwal Kumar Singh joined a call and pressed record. We were curious to see what would happen. A few weeks later I’d done the same with Neil Taylor and Clare ...

The practice of representing the customer's perspective within quality and engineering teams, going beyond verifying acceptance criteria to ask whether a product can genuinely be used by real people to achieve their goals. A quality professional practicing customer advocacy develops deep familiarity with how different customer types interact with the product, including non-technical users, and uses that knowledge to evaluate whether features make sense, flow naturally, and hold together as a coherent experience. This goes beyond checking that something works and asks whether the right thing was built in the right way for the people who will use it.For example: validating that terminology is consistent across a product built by multiple teams; observing real customer training sessions to understand where frustration occurs; or testing a feature against known customer setup patterns rather than a single idealised scenario.

Customer advocacy in an AI-saturated quality space

Strengths: - Has that puppy dog look down pat. Mum can never say no - Knows how to take up most of the bed - Is a gentle man Weaknesses: - Demanding - Barks whenever his sister barks, even ...

Strengths: - Steals her brother's toys - Sleeps through most meetings or barks when Mum wants to talk - Will appear out of nowhere for lettuce Weakness: - Gets angry at her brother when he w...

I’m excited to share that, alongside TeamMoT, we’ll be gathering 50 Leaders in Quality on September 30th. What looks like a one-day event is actually the beginning of a bigger journey: a committ...

Notes of key moments and learnings from Leading with Quality - Podcast, where the guest was Deborah Sherwood

Discover how to scale quality through others while keeping customer needs and human insight at the centre

At the recent MoT London meetup, I was excited to finally meet Simon in the 3D! We have spoken a few times online over recent years, but being able to meet in person was awesome!

The stars aligned, and I happened to be in London for work, in the MoT London meetup was on in June. I was able to meet Rosie in the 3D and did my first 99 second talk on testing with AI. It was an...

Deborah Sherwood and I caught up over a Leading with Quality conversation, and what a pleasure! There are a few things that have been cool about this connection and how we got here: 1. She's be...

A person holding a copy of The Testing Planet newspaper.